“IUUI 1?” Important, useful, used, interesting: Part 1.
That post appeared May 6, 2013–about a week after The Big Deal and the Damage Done appeared and shortly after this:
Which then leads to a question that came up this weekend: What would it take to make the book freely available (in ebook form)–that is, downloadable for $0.00 rather than $9.99?
That discussion went on in various venues for a while. I looked into how unglue.it works and found some issues with my personality and expectations. People started wishing for it to be unglued, a process that started out rapidly and then basically stalled (seems to me it got to 19 in a couple of days and is now at 21).
But this also happened–and maybe it made the whole “freely available” discussion somewhat mood.
As announced in this post on May 23, 2013, I published a second PDF ebook edition, one that includes explicit permission to load the PDF on a campus ebook server (or whatever) that lacks simultaneous-user controls, that is, one that allows material to be used by any number of authorized users simultaneously.
That means, or should mean, that one $40 purchase can make the book available for downloading by an entire library school class (and all the faculty at the institution).
Will there be a second edition of this work, including 2012 data? That depends on future sales of the book–and on other considerations as well.
I don’t see doing a kickstarter or indiegogo or other campaign for this particular book.
I am considering such a campaign, but for a different “future edition,” and that’s a topic for another post.
Oh, and there’s one other followup on this: Chapter 1 of the book (and a few paragraphs from the final chapter) appear in the July 2013 Cites & Insights–published yesterday, June 1, 2013. Don’t expect additional excerpts to appear in C&I: At $9.99 for a single non-DRM PDF ebook or $40 for a campus license, I don’t think the book’s outrageously expensive. (There’s also, to be sure, the $16.50 paperback, although the graphs aren’t quite as colorful in that form.)
[Eagle-eyed readers may note that the link in the preceding paragraph is to the C&I home page, not to a specific issue; that’s also true for the links in C&I publicity. Why? To remind people–just a little–that C&I survives on donations. Yes, it’s working, to an extent–for the year, total donations are now up to three digits not including the decimal point. I’m grateful for each and every donation.]
